Life Under the Blue Sky: The View From Below

What My Friend Jon, the Evolatheist, said, pt 3

I have been thinking much about this whole evolution thing. I have to stay on my toes because everytime and evolutionist, or Darwinist (which I recently learned is like an insult) comes here and visits they inform me of how much I don’t know. Then they take it upon themselves to ‘sit me down’ and instruct in the right way. Mrs. Heasley, my 10 grade biology teacher must not have done a very good job. Shame on her.

Let’s review, so far, what we have learned. First, we learned, from an atheist’s own mouth (or keyboard as it were) that evolution instills in a human no particular purpose whatsoever. Now a friend from another blog, Jeff, informed me that his life does in fact have a great deal of satisfaction and purpose but I’ll take him as a rare exception. Fact is, according to evolution, we are all trekking towards that great graveyard called the fossil-bed. Second, we learned that evolution has not yet been able to overcome death. Death has not been overcome–in fact, the average life expectancy hasn’t really been undone either. We might make it to 80, and some do live to be over 100; they are rare exceptions.

So far, Darwinian evolution is rather disappointing. I have no reason to go on living, and no reason to expect not to die. Here, I’d like to point out a third thing that evolution has not given us: Evolution has not given us a higher value of life. Or, to put it negatively, Darwinism has cheapened life. It has made life dispensible, valueless, cheap, expendible. It sounds terrible, but, sadly, it is only too true.

I’m willing to go out on a limb here and make a couple of statments that some folks may find rather offensive, but what choice is there? Darwinian Evolution has been the catalyst behind racial genocide (think Stalin, Hitler among others), human bondage (think slavery), and the deaths of untold millions of humans through abortion, eugenics, cloning, and euthanasia. These things are nothing more than survival of the fittest. Read this short essay for a glimpse of the ‘benefits’ of Darwinism: Eugenics (MORE ESSAYS ON THE ABOVE TOPICS).

Darwinian evolution has done nothing to created among human beings a more profound view of the grandness of life because it has taken away the most fundamental aspect of such an idea: That we were specially made in the image of a God who is Good. Consider this abstract from an essay on Darwinism and the Nazi’s:

Leading Nazis, and early 1900 influential German biologists, revealed in their writings that Darwin’s theory and publications had a major influence upon Nazi race policies. Hitler believed that the human gene pool could be improved by using selective breeding similar to how farmers breed superior cattle strains. In the formulation of their racial policies, Hitler’s government relied heavily upon Darwinism, especially the elaborations by Spencer and Haeckel. As a result, a central policy of Hitler’s administration was the development and implementation of policies designed to protect the ‘superior race’. This required at the very least preventing the ‘inferior races’ from mixing with those judged superior, in order to reduce contamination of the latter’s gene pool. The ‘superior race’ belief was based on the theory of group inequality within each species, a major presumption and requirement of Darwin’s original ‘survival of the fittest’ theory. This philosophy culminated in the ‘final solution’, the extermination of approximately six million Jews and four million other people who belonged to what German scientists judged as ‘inferior races’.

Now, to be fair, I must say this: Not all Darwinists are abortionists and not all abortionists are Darwinists (some are merely murderers; others are both). Furthermore, I would expect that even the most resolute Darwinist would denounce what happened in Germany and the Soviet Union in the last century. Nevertheless, we continue to see the structure of the whole ‘human life as an experiement’ built upon a foundation of Darwinian evolution whether it is genocide in Rwanda or abortion in America. It matters little.

To be sure, not all Darwinists are prone to such violence and not all have cheapened human life in the manner of a Hitler or a Stalin. I think what is frightening though is that if such structures were built once upon such a premise, isn’t it possible that such structures could be built again? What I mean is this: We all have a propensity for constructing the most evil we can out of the given resources. So what happens when life ultimately, because it is merely a struggle to keep a species alive, becomes meaningless because the value of the individual is rendered meaningless?

Furthermore, I don’t see any particular reason why Darwinists would try to combat such a philosophy. In what name can the Darwinist espouse a truly value filled picture of human life? Would it be based on mere humanism? Empathy? Altruism? Are human beings, sinners all, capable of constructing a ‘value of life’ philopshy on the foundation of something that necessarily devalues life? I sincerely doubt it, but I’m willing to be corrected.

If life is the meaningless rampage of our DNA through time and space how can there be any value on the individual? If life is the unguided process of the transfer of DNA from one generation to the next how can any individual hope to be of value? I read in A Case For a Creator by Lee Strobel that Stephen Hawking said, “We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred thousand million galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence” (118). That is precisely the point I’m making: without God life is pure meaninglessness. Thus we can go about doing whatever we want in order that we cause our own survival; who else can save us? It seems to me, however, that even evolution is about survival (salvation?) of the species. It’s just that in evolution we do it ourselves without any help from anyone else, let alone a god.

Somehow that isn’t very encouraging considering the manner in which we treat each other. We’re like children at the lunch table saying, “Please tell little John to sit at another table because we don’t like him.” Human beings are beyond mean sometimes and if we treat each other like that at the lunch table as children then we go to war with each other kill one another as adults. No. Evolution has not taught us to value life or one another. It has taught us to survive by any means possible. It has taught us there is only one thing we can do: Make certain those few years between our first and last breath are survived. I don’t really think that is living.

On the other hand, someone said:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 19This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. 21But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.” (John 3:16-21, NIV)

I just can’t look a child or another human in the face and tell them: You are meaningless. And yet, every time Darwinian evolution is propounded and propagandized that is exactly what people are told. God says differently. He says, You have value, so much value in fact, that I sent my Only Son to die for you. His Only Son, my friend Jon says, is a liar, and pteradactyl, and a fairy King. Hmm. I see Darwinian Evolution hasn’t given us creative minds either. Those are the same things the devil says.

Soli Deo Gloria!

jerry

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[Steven, I have written a lengthy reply to your post. Sadly, even though WordPress assures me I have already posted it, I cannot find it at all. I don’t know if it’s here or not. Something seems to be blocking me from seeing the reply I made to you. Look for my reply on the front page of my blog.–jerry]

Hitler, of course, believed that human beings had been made in the image of God.

From volume 2 of Mein Kampf “Thus for the first time a high inner purpose is accredited to the State. In face of the ridiculous phrase that the State should do no more than act as the guardian of public order and tranquillity, so that everybody can peacefully dupe everybody else, it is given a very high mission indeed to preserve and encourage the highest type of humanity which a beneficent Creator has bestowed on this earth.”

“And, further, they ought to be brought to realize that it is their bounden duty to give to the Almighty Creator beings such as He himself made to His own image.”

And in Hitler’s private conversation, he expressed his doubt that human beings had descended from other creatures.

‘From where do we get the right to believe that man was not from the very beginning what he is today.

A glance in Nature shows us , that changes and developments happen in the realm of plants and animals. But nowhere do we see inside a kind, a development of the size of the leap that Man must have made, if he supposedly has advanced from an ape-like condition to what he is’ (now)

I’ll have to take your word on the translation. I’m not really certain what point you are trying to make, although I do recall reading something in the Scripture that says ‘even the devils believe and tremble.’

But I’d like to point out, as ‘Larry’ pointed out in another reply, Darwin also believed in Jesus and God. That did not stop Darwin, however, from writing his On the Origin of Species. Furthermore, Hitler scholar that you are, what does this prove?

Your quotes certainly do not prove that Hitler was a Christian, they do not prove he believed in God (at least the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, and, since you will no doubt recall, Hitler persecuted Christians with as much vigor as he did Jews; Dietrich Bonhoeffer being one;), nor do they prove that Hitler’s theories were not developed on a foundation of Darwinian Evolution.

Furthermore, no one here, at least, said that all those who believe in a Creator are absolved of guilt. No, in fact, I claim that all are sinners and all have fallen short of the glory of God.

Now, Hitler scholar that you are, you have no doubt read from Joachim Fest’s work simply titled: Hitler. I refer you to pages 55-59 of the 1974 English edition:

“His experiences and circumstances during this phase of his life helped Hitler arrive at the philosophy of struggle that became the central core of his view of the world, its ‘granite foundation,’ as he stressed, which he had no need of ever again changing. The view he formed from his contacts with the inmates in the home for men came to the fore again and again in later years, whenever he professed his belief in brutal struggle, in harshness, cruelty, destruction, the rights of the stronger–as he did in countless speeches and discussions, in the pages of his book, and in his table talk at the Fuhrer’s headquarters during the war. He never forgot the lessons he had learned in that school for meanness in Vienna.”

“Nevertheless, the component of Social Darwinism in Hitler’s thought cannot be attributed solely to his personal experiences in the home for men. He was really reflecting the tendency of the age. Science had become the one truly unchallenged authority. As the laws of evolution and selection put forth by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were popularized in numerous pseudoscientific publications, the average man soon came to know that the ‘struggle for existence’ was the fundamental principle of life, the ‘survival of the fittest’ the basic law governing the societal conduct of individuals and nations. The so-called ‘Social Darwinist’ theory served, for a while at least, all camps, factions, and parties in the second half of the nineteenth century. It became a component of leftist populist education before the Right took up the creed for its own purposes, and argued the unnaturalness of democratic or humanitarian ideas by appealing to Darwinist princles.”

“The initial concept was that just as in untrammeled nature, social processes and the destinies of nations are determined by biological premises. Only a rigorous process of selection, involve both extermination and deliberate breeding, can prevent faulty lines of evolution and assure one nations superiority over others. Writers like Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Madison Grant, Ludwig Grumplowicz, and Ottob Ammon took up the theme and were popularized in their turn by lesser journalists. They had already hit on the whole sinister program: the annihilation of unworthy organism, the techniques of deliberate population policy [Which I might add have been espoused, perhaps in different language, by people like Al Gore, former VP of the USA, abortion rights activists, euthanasia and eugenics proponents.–jerry], the forcible institutionalization and sterilization of the unfit, the determination of genetic superiority [Can you say, ‘Human Genome project’?–jerry] by the size of the head, the shape of the ears or the length of the nose. Often these views were accompanied by a frank rejection of Christian morality, tolerance, and humanitarian progress–all of which, it was argued, favored the weak and were therefore counterselective. To be sure, Social Darwinism was never elaborated into a comprehensive system, and some of its advocates later retracted their views. But this did not diminish its widespread popularity. On the whole, Social Darwinism was one of the classical ideologies of the bourgeois age. The imperialistic practice and robust capitalistic aggrandizement of the period could be justified as part and parcel of inescapable natural law.” (56)

Now, permit me a moment more your time for a couple of more quotes from Fest.

“Hiter’s Social Darwinist views, therefore, were not simply the ‘philosophy of the doss-house.’ Rather, they show him once again in harmony with the bourgeois age, whose product and destroyer he was.” (57)

“Those political writings [of Wagner–jerry], together with the operas, form the entire framework for Hitler’s ideology: Darwinism and Anti-Semitism (“I hold the Jewish race to be the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in man”), the adoration of barbarism and Germanic might, the mystiquie of blood purification expressed in Parsifal, and the general histrionic view in which good and evil, purity and corruption, rulers and the ruled, stand opposed in black and white contrasts.” (58)

I hope this fills in your understanding of the foundations of Hitler’s ideas a little more fully. Hitler was, then, no Christian and his ideologies were not built on any foundation found in the Biblical Witness we call Scripture.

If this picture does not fill in Hitler’s picture enough, I would direct you to two volumes by Prof Ian Kershaw: Hitler: Hubris (vol 1), Hitler: Nemesis (vol 2). You might also consider reading Winston Churchill’s six volume set on the History of WW II. I’m sure all these volumes will make for a much better, unbiased reading of Hitler. To only read M* K* (which is necessarily biased towards its author!) will not adequately explain the picture of Hitler who was born, breast-fed, and eventually became (along with Wagner, Nietzsche & Freud), a harbinger of Darwinism taken to its logical, and necessary, conclusions.

Thanks for stopping by,
jerry

PS–I hope this only posted once, I’m having a wee bit of trouble with the blog editor or my computer.

Life Under the Blue Sky

Thanks for visiting with me for a little while. I hope you find something here that is helpful or encouraging in some way.
There's a lot here and I hope that what it shows is a little or a lot of growth on my part. That said, some of the older stuff you find in here may not be all that helpful. I used to be rather graceless and judgmental. Much of that has changed as I have grown more and more accustomed to the grace of God.
I will also be changing the format here soon. For now I have been blogging sermons and lessons (and I will continue that), but in the not too distant future this blog will be overhauled to reflect more changes taking place in my life. Thanks again for the visit and as always, feel free to leave a comment.
jerry